Seagate 14TB IronWolf and IronWolf Pro NAS HDDs are made for creative pros

Seagate has introduced new hard drives for Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices: the 14TB IronWolf and 14TB IronWolf Pro HDDs. The new models offer users access to high-performance hardware alongside management and recovery tools, making it possible to upload and download large amounts of data remotely without stressing about drive failures.

Both the 14TB IronWolf and IronWolf Pro models feature Seagate's AgileArray technology, which optimizes the HDDs for multi-drive storage systems. Both models also offer up to 256MB cache, but the IronWolf Pro has a longer mean time between failures (MTBF) of 1.2 million hours versus the IronWolf's 1 million hours.

As well, the 14TB IronWolf comes with a 3-year warranty, whereas the IronWolf Pro has a 5-year warranty. The regular IronWolf model is targeted at small businesses and home use with a 180TB/year workload rating, while the IronWolf Pro is intended for creative professionals, among others, with a 300TB/year workload rating.

The Pro model includes data rescue services, which are an optional addition for the IronWolf model

Both the 14TB IronWolf and IronWolf Pro feature rotational vibration sensors, but differ in support for multi-drive configurations: the IronWolf can be used in devices with up to 8 bays and the IronWolf Pro can be used in devices with up to 24 bays. The Pro model includes data rescue services, which are an optional addition for the IronWolf model.

Comments

For creative pros? Or pros that just run their cameras in continuous mode until they get a couple of photos that are acceptable. Wonder what these pros would do if all they had was a roll of film with 36 photo capability on it?

I only use enterprise drives, have been using them for the last 4 years. The extra cost is justified for the reliability and durability they offer. Seagate Exos drives are not too expensive than the barracuda drives but offers longer MTBF, 1 in 1x10e15 read error rate and better RAID performance.

on paper the seagates are really tempting. good specs and good price. its the reason I bought 4 drives.2 of them died before the warranty and were replaced and one of those died as well. I have given up on seagate. I also dont like WD but not much choice today. I loved hitachi drives. shame they sold it to wd. its not the same quality.

Yeah I had a similar story a few years ago. Had a brand-new Seagate and it failed in about 2 months. Called for warranty, they sent out a refurb drive that simply didn't work (the BIOS would not recognize it as the right size, no matter what I did -- and I'm in IT).

Finally got Seagate to send another drive out to replace the replacement. Meanwhile, my gently-used portable Seagate crashed, my wife's laptop drive crashed 2 weeks later (Seagate) and then my buddy called for support and yep....crashed Seagate laptop drive as well.

Some interesting numbers: The manufacturer states that the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is 1.2 MILLION hours for the "pro" version, which offers a 5-year warranty.

There are 8,760 hours in a year. Which means that there ought to be a shade under 137 years of 24/7 use available before one of these units is expected to crap out on you.

It seems to me that they could have offered a 25-year warranty and they still wouldn't be replacing many of these drives... given that there should be over 110 years of decent life left in them after 25 years of continuous use.

If you look at what little stats there are in terms of drive lifespan, mainly the numbers published by Backblaze, MTF has no real meaning. It's just marketing. Basically you are paying for an extended warranty. Don't even think of running these drives without a RAID or nightly backup.

The flaw is that you looked at the Mean Time Between Failure. You know what Mean means, right? It means "in the middle of the extremes."

We all know some drives fail out of the box. And some drives run for 10 years. And both will be used as anecdotes by DPR posters who feel like their experience represents the whole.

If you have a MTBF of 137 years, that probably means some drives could last a couple centuries, and some, as we know, will fail out of the box. And some fail in the middle, in the classic bathtub curve.

If you bought one that died out of the box, would you accept a response from the mfr saying "No replacement. We don't have a warranty because it has a MTBF of 137 years." Of course you would not accept that. You would be livid and never buy their product again.

That is why they have a 5-year warranty. The warranty is never for the drives that survive 400 years. The warranty is there for the drives that will always fail at the front end of the bathtub curve.

Actually, "mean" is *not* defined as the "middle of the extremes" as you've stated.

What your referring to is the "median" value.

The mean is simply the average value of all of the numbers in the set. There are times when it's far more descriptive to use one instead of the other. For example, if there are 100 homes in your neighborhood and *everyone* has a net worth between $150,000 - $300,000, you could add up all the figures, divide by 100 and get a fair approximation of the "mean" or "average" household net worth.

BUT, if Amazon founder Jeff Bezos lives in your neighborhood, his $160 billion net worth would completely screw up the mean. His wealth alone would drive the neighborhood mean to just over $1.6 billion.

The MEDIAN net worth of everyone in your neighborhood won't be affected by a single outlier. The median is simply the value that lies dead center (and in this case, would probably be a far more accurate $225,000 or so).

MTBF is a population statistic. It is not how long a drive is expected to last, but rather an expression of the failure rate within the drive's warranty period. There are documented cases of drives lasting over 10 years of continuous use, but that's really pushing it. 25 years may be impossible, and 137 is definitely impossible. A way to think about MTBF is that if you have an MTBF of 1.2M hours, it means that if you have a population of 1.2 million drives, you can expect one to fail every hour, at least in the first 5 years of drive life.

Most people have an easier time understanding AFR, the "annualized failure rate," which expresses the same information as MTBF. AFR is the percentage of the population that would fail in one year. To convert MTBF to AFR, divide 8760 hours by the MTBF (8760 is the number of hours in one year). So 1.2M hours MTBF = 8760/(1.2*10^6) = 0.73% AFR.

I'd go with the Pro version. $600 is not terribly bad, but I'll wait for a year or so until the competition heats up, and the price drops considerably. Not hurting for storage right now. I have plenty.

I have an 8TB and a 10TB IronWolf and have had no issues with them (although at that sample size it's irrelevant), they do make an odd noise when they spin up, but they spin up quickly which is good in a home NAS. BTW on the Qnap forums people are reporting a lot of issues with the WD Reds in Qnap boxes, which may just be that WD have a lot of the market and Qnap sell a lot of boxes, or either they or Qnap have a minor incompatibility issue (it's not drive failures). I needed the ATA backplane replaced when I changed to WD Reds as I was getting errors.

Wow. Trouble is you'd have to buy two so one could be backup. That's an immense amount of data to put on an old fashioned HDD. They are severely limited in usefulness by antiquated transfer speeds.of around 200 MB/s. It really only makes sense if the size and speed increase together. For instance NVME M.2 drives are an order of magnitude faster in transfer speeds. What we actually need is a 14TB NVME drive - that would make more sense.

Not really the point of these drives. They are high capacity drives meant for long term storage. A slower but reliable medium is exactly what they are designed for. Do you really think you need SSDs for remote access? Or indeed for long term storage. Even tapes are better for long term backup use than NVME. When considering data backup there is a lot to consider other than speed. I see data centres going the route of SSD quite often for their storage because the salesmen pushes that idea, even though it is not the best place to put the SSDs. Why? Because they are profitable, that is all.

syberman7 is of course right.could you imagine coping all your files to the HDDs and a mate comes by and sees you copying terrabytes of files with these ancient speeds???He will mock you and the size of your sensor for the rest of time!!!

RE: ...did you think about erasing some of your files?A. All the time, though it would seem that I'm just too lazy lol

Seriously though, I make it a personal policy to never throw anything out. And I can't count the number of time this has worked out for me. ie, everytime a new photo recovery software comes out, such as noise reduction, or highlight recovery, I go back to my old(old) RAW files and give it a whirl - it's just so exciting to be able to revive old photo's with technology

And we are straight on our way to 8 k UHD - 4 times the amount of data.

images are the least things that I'd worry about - video is much much more data intense - I have a NAS with 40 TB usable space at home and I am looking forward to doubling it with 20 TB drives as a replacement for my 10 TB drives.

I doubt anyone buys even an 8TB drive because of program install bloat, even games with tons of textures and data files don't take *that* big much space... Video and volume shooters of high res files are probably the candidates here.

My 5Dsr averages 76MB per shutter press (67MB for a Raw plus 9MB for a large medium JPEG), so 100k images would be about 7.6TB. However I have some files when working on Panos that are a significant percentage of a GB and usually a bunch of them (one HDR pano consists of 4.5GB of files).The GH5 produces about 67GB/ hour shooting 4k/10-bit/422/IBP.That said a lot of the data I have is computer stuff (VMs and backups of assorted boxes), followed by video projects and then stills.

Cute names for hard drives. Problem is, they all eventually fail, have never noticed one brand to be better than others in this regard, except for the controller failure on 3TB Seagates that precipitated a class-action lawsuit.

My 75GB IBM Deathstar was all about the fail... I remember walking up in college to an empty desktop and panicking about what I'd left there, half an hour later I discovered random drive errors had somehow renamed the Desktop folder to Desotop and it was all still there, ahh Windows 98.

One interesting aspect of hard-drive history, was the technological division between the commercial and consumer products. ie, most people were unaware that IBM had hard-drives spanning several MB as far back as the early 60's. Whereas the first consumer hard-disks wouldn't become mainstream until the 80's.

I myself witnessed the very first hard-disk at our high-school on a Tandy PC, that used floppy disks the size of a large record. The thing was not only massive, but sounded like someone was pinging a glass plate during the read and write operations. That must of been around '86. After which, things appeared to move quickly toward the IDE drives, which did away with the classic clankers of the day.

Whatever the case, the progression of technology never ceases to amaze me. Though what seems even more impressive to me, is the sheer amount of data we can now store on tiny cards the size of postage stamps - which seem to be nothing short of a miracle compared to the beginning!

I've been in the industry for many years now. I have worked on everything from mercury delay line memory to high capacity SSD enterprise class systems connected to mainframes and the like. Been working on one this week. It really is astonishing how far we have come, but have also gone backwards at the same time. People have lost the knowledge and skills to buy and choose what is actually the best tool for the job. People are obsessed with the latest shiny and new options and rarely see the drawbacks. SSD has numerous limitations and is often very under utilised. HDD or even LTO tapes can bee a better option in many scenarios. Back in the days of IBM, ICL and the like, when platters the size of a car were spinning in temperature and humidity controlled clean rooms things were more considered and had to be. I was in a building a few weeks ago where one of those old roughly 2m diameter disks was on show. It was 5mb capacity. Astonishing.

I remember on my first "real" job having a RL01 (maybe RL02) clone (DG) to save my project data on. That's either 5MB or 10MB in a 2" high removable round plastic box about the size of the largest Pizza you can get. Then again I have Crowther and Wood's game on paper tape, assorted stuff on punch cards and some 8" floppys... oh and 8 and 10TB IronWolfs...

Paid way too much for a 75GB 75GXP IBM Deathstar in 2000, friends famously said "you'll never fill that!" (and I managed to before it failed)... I think the size of the one in my first build was measured in MB tho, but my earlier builds were mostly massive upgrades on Dell systems. That 75GB was the first one from scratch... Now there's >75GB in use on my phone, heh.

Besides, SSD have much higher failure rates than HDD. I remember when consumer SSDs first came out, the reviews left you scratching your head whether you should take the gamble of losing all your data for speed. Today, they have gotten better but HDD I believe are still more reliable than SSDs.

I'd wait until it's been out in use for some months before buying any drive, and then scour the reviews. My most reliable drive has been inside my 5th generation iPod. It's a Toshiba 240GB hard drive and it's been running around 11 years with almost daily use. The past four years it has remained inside my cars but before that it was carried all the time. During that time it hit the ground probably more than 100 times. That freak of a drive needs to be studied and the design adopted for all other drives.

@Impulses The 240GB 1.8” drive in my iPod is a dual platter. I may never find out how long it will last because I'm thinking of replacing the drive with a flash drive for quicker access. Back in the day when I installed the 240GB drive in the iPod, I stored a lot on it, videos and podcasts, along with my music. The big file side has been taken over by my iPad mini 4 and a grandfathered unlimited data account, so I don’t need a flash drive anywhere near that big. The slow access speeds have always been annoying anyway. I also have no interest in constantly plugging in my iPhone so the old and trusty iPod remains.

I have old enterprise drives that spin down during idle states that appear to be lasting forever. Though I'll likely retire them due to their size rather than reliability. Which would seem to be what hard-drive life expectancy should be.

If you were working regularly with 4K video, these would seem very relevant. I currently use a 12TB Raid Zero with a Thunderbolt 3 interface. I currently use 8TB Seagate drives for back-up and archiving. To keep my Raid available for scratch disk and rendering, I do not use it for storage. These would be perfect for archiving and back-up purposes.

If you only shoot stills you are forgiven for not understanding how big the files are in hybrid shooting.

Keeping in mind that the vast majority of NAS devices are limited to the speed of a Gigabit Ethernet port, which is a theoretical 1000Mb/sec or 125MB/sec. That is the speed of a good hard drive, or 1/4 the speed of an average SATA SSD.

To get the most out of fast/RAID hard drives or SSD on a NAS, you have to pony up the big bucks for 10Gb Ethernet ports, cards, and switches.

If you must have SSD/NVME speeds in an external mass storage/multibay device, you forget about any affordable form of NAS and you instead go DAS (Direct Attached Storage) through USB 3.1 10Mb/sec or preferably, Thunderbolt 3 at a theoretical 40Gb/sec.

its nice to have 10TB SSDs but its will be very expensive and also even now SSD disks are not high stable, good HDDs are much better, and, again, they are way cheaper, for example, I always keep all my files at my HDDs, but before process some folder with photos, I copy it to SSD...

Once you start amassing terrabytes worth of files you will need a conventional hard disk for cold storage and probably an extra for back up. You can get a 8tb Hard disk for just 150 USD now. How much is a 4tb SSD? 900 usd?

As usual, for each new capacity, we will have the following comments- That's ridiculous, who needs such a high capacity?- That's a lot of lost data in case of disk crash !- How can you make a backup of so much data?- Too expensive !

I recently bought two 8tb externals (the second one will be back up) so that I can move and consolidate the old photos from a dozen externals I have amassed. At the rate I'm shooting stills and videos I can imagine getting the 16tb a few years from now.

I own several external drives of various sizes (2 GB and 5 GB), and probably have about 11 GB per set. I always buy in pairs, back up in pairs, and only ever attach and power up when I plan to use. Therefore the devices only run a few hours at a time, and last for many years. The prices listed for these sizes are not unreasonable. I agree that if I currently bought some new units, the cost per GB for smaller capacity units would be cheaper than these, but the hassle of many units would still exist. To each his own.

Yeah, I did mean TB drives, not GB drives. Need more sleep, I guess. The point is that the storage does not need 24/7 access, so why leave plugged in all the time the computer is running? If you use these drives only a few hours a day, or even better, only a few hours a week, they last a long time. There are plenty of times my PC is on that I am not editing photos, so therefore no need to have the drives connected, and I am willing to bet that most people are that way also.

Well that is why we were talking about NAS and DAS. Many people use Network Attached Storage, so they can access their files anytime from any device. NAS storage has also other advantages, you can set automatic backup, increase availability with raid, have consistent files across all your devices, the ability to work with multiple people on the same files with proper version history etc....

And if we talk about the drive presented here it is made for exactly that, run 24/7 for many years without being turned on/off or moved. Turning the drive on/off all the time will reduce the life expectancy compared to running 24/7. Even more problematic is having it in a external enclosure and probably moving it while operating. These drives are designed for server and NAS use, so they are probably best used that way. So running them 24/7/365 for 5-8 years is probably fine

It is great to see some new sizes. That said the speed of capacity growth has really slowed down.And if every now and then new sizes are released they almost always have worse price/gb factors than their smaller broders. In general capacity has not become much cheaper over the last five years.

That all makes sense, since consumers aren't buying these drives anymore, and data centers can afford the prices. But for me that is a real problem. For years I have passed on upgrading my NAS and now it is time. But I really hope for some lower prices

@panther fan: That makes perfect sense. I usually buy them in a set of two. Leave one at home and one at work. I sync up the contents periodically. So far, I only have about 3-4 TB of data so it's not too bad.

@QuangFotoWell I do something similar, but with 18TB each ;) Since all is in raid 0/5 or 6 I have about 48TB of hard drives in use. In sizes of 3/4 and 8 TB.

The 3 and 4 TB ones are seriously beyond their lifetime and even the 8 TB models are nearly 4 years old now. So I probably need to get at least 60TB of new hard drives to replace old ones and increase system size (my current system is at 98% capacity) that together with a new NAS system will cost some serious money.But I have waited long enough, time to bite the bullet before something goes wrong with my current system. I also want to switch back from my self build W/Server 2012 to synology, if only their ECC models were cheaper....

I think the reason the prices haven't gone down is because the growth potential is simply not there - yet. These drives are for NAS systems, and data centers. They're not likely to be seen in desktop PC's in the quantities that would make the prices go down.

Mechanical hard drives I think will be relegated to being storage devices in arrays, and that means without having end-consumers buying them in droves, the prices will remain somewhat stagnant.

Pretty amazing to have this kind of capacity in a drive. I'd love to put six of these drives into my TB2 Promise RAID tower.

I've had good experiences with Synology. Three arrays: 20TB, 36TB, and about 1/3PB, all working perfectly. Used to use a Linux cluster packed with disk drives, but the Synology is just really well done.

well, I'm guessing for non-professional needs people don't buy 14tb to store photos or documents or even their holiday videos. I believe the need in storage exploded only because people needed space for movies, series and music, and not always obtained legally. Now people are used to new way of consuming contents like streaming so I'm guess a NAS with 2x4tb should be enough for most of those users.

But I'm a bit in the same situation... I've waited for a long time for bigger capacities to be released so the 6/8tb would be cheaper but it didn't really happen. The price per tb is more or less the same as before the factories were flooded. And now for an upgrade I need to buy two disks and re-use/resell 2x4tb...

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